Occupation! SAW takes over the Defence Materials Technology Centre

Yesterday, with polls finding that 60% of Australians wished for an immediate withdrawal of occupying forces from Afghanistan, politicians on both sides of parliament pledging that Australian troops would remain there for at least another decade, and the Sydney Morning Herald announcing that “Australia digs in for war with no end”, Students Against War took matters into our own hands and occupied the university’s Defence Materials Technology Centre, bringing its operations to a total, grinding halt.

The Environment Collective has 3,000 signatures on a petition asking for 100% renewable energy on campus and has been ignored by administration, the Save UOW Music group has over 700 members and has experienced a similar fate, and so we decided that, instead of asking someone to stop UOW’s war research for us - well, we’d simply move in and stop it ourselves!

The day began with our members taking radio interviews for WaveFM, i98FM, ABC Illawarra and Sydney station 2SER. Then, at  about lunchtime, alerted by texts, word-of-mouth and e-mails, a small crew of 12 formed up on the Jugglers’ Lawn, chatted to journalists from WIN News that we’d invited, and tested out our musical instruments. (Part of the absurdity of the Defence Materials Technology Centre is that, although money can be found for this $85 million program, the university is completely eliminating its music program and refusing to purchase more renewable energy due to alleged lack of funding.)

Then, when everyone had assembled, we strolled into the Engineering building, down the corridor, and simply walked right in through the conveniently wide open door of the DMTC offices. After a brief chat with staff (“Look, if you insist on staying you’re disrupting my work.” “That’s the idea.”) we declared the vacated offices ours, and settled in to see what the uni had in store for us.

While we waited we made ourselves at home, reading, talking, laughing, sitting round, jamming on our instruments, and making the offices a bit more visually interesting. Meanwhile WIN News sat outside and did a report on us.

Then security finally came, we had a chat with them, and… then nothing much happened! We just stayed in the empty offices, waited around for a few hours stopping any research from being carried out, then marched out with much noise and fanfare, and went off to the bar and drank beer… watched the whole time by three or four incredibly paranoid security guards.

And thus SAW ended the year with a bang, with about ten times the participants that we’d begun with, thousands and thousands of leaflets and posters distributed, many successful events carried out, and media and campus notoriety. We’ll be back in 2011 with ten times the number of people again :)

Update 27 Oct: SAW has been made aware that on the day of the occupation both the Mckinnon Building and the  admininistration block were in lock down and swarming with security guards in anticipation of student protests.  This needlessly caused disruption for students and staff and wasted university resources at a time when the music program is facing the axe.  It was also ineffective in preventing the student anti-war actions which occurred in another part of the university.